American Toilets

Toilets of the U.S.A.

What are American toilets like?
According to many Americans, their toilets must be the
very best and cleanest in the entire world.
That's because everything is better in America, right?
According to this theory, American toilets make perfect sense
while those in the rest of the world can be mysterious
and even strange.
So, here's some proof to the contrary featuring toilets
from New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles,
the Midwest, and other places across the U.S.A.

Let's start our tour at
Ray's Pizza.

Places called "Ray's Pizza" are
about as thick on the ground in Manhattan as Starbucks.
This one is at
3rd Avenue and St Mark's Place.
in the
East Village
in
New York.

The bathrooms with the ceramic tile walls are the
men's facilities in the heavily (ab)used downstairs.
Below are pictures from the men's room upstairs,
where there is a no-graffiti rule and at least an attempt
to keep things a little more classy.

Nothing says class like large sheets of
stainless steel
needed to withstand the abuse of hundreds of drunken
yet sophisticated members of the fraternity and
sorority system.

This very large urinal is at
The Spot Tavern
in
Lafayette,Indiana.
It's at
409 South 4th Street.

It is an unusual design for a urinal, at least by today's
standards.
It looks like a large sink like what you might find in an
industrial setting.

However, notice it is mounted low on the wall, an appropriate
location for a urinal but far too low to be a sink.

Also notice the red pipe running across the top.
Perforated along its bottom side, it flushes the urinal.

Finally, there are the bright pink urinal cakes — it
obviously is intended to be used as a urinal.

The
Triple XXX
diner is a popular local spot in
West Lafayette,
on State Street
just down the hill from the Purdue campus.
"On the hill, but on the level", they say.

The Triple XXX open 24 hours and is next to a
university campus, so it gets pretty hard use.
During a recent visit, the men's room was "out of service."
I'm sure we didn't want to know the details.
Here is the relatively nice women's.

The classic dish there is the biscuits and gravy.
Below is the notorious Full Order.

It's room ECE 126, directly across from one
entry to the large lecture hall in ECE 129.
The building key (coded "EBSMA") which opens all
the exterior doors also admits you to its
retro and very plain interior.

These partly functional urinals and toilet are at
McClure's Truck Stop
along Interstate highway I-65
outside
Lebanon,Indiana,
between Indianapolis and Chicago.

The Tom Wolfe
page has more on the history of truck stop toilets through
the mid to late Twentieth Century.

New York City is
notorious for a lack of public toilets,
at least in some areas like Midtown Manhattan.

Here is an exception!

At left and right here you see the very nice
public restroom at Bryant Park.
This is a public park between Fifth and Sixth Avenues
and between 40th and 42nd Streets.
The main building of the New York Public Library occupies the
east side of this double-sized Midtown block.

The park had been taken over by the homeless,
drug dealers, and prostitutes by the late 1970s.
The park was closed in the 1980s and excavated.
An underground structure housing the New York Public Library's
archives is now below the re-created park.

A
New York Times article,
"A Resplendent Park Respite, Mosaic Tiles Included",
quotes the parks commissioner as saying
"It sets the gold standard for park comfort stations".
It's the grandest of the park system's 600 bathrooms.
The 2006 renovation cost $200,000 but was expected to last
for six years and over three million visitors, only $0.06
per use.

That's in Midtown.
The Bryant Park Corporation, a non-profit private organization,
operates the park for the city, and the high visibility and
routine use of the central location make it an important
facility.

However, as you go further downtown, you leave the much
higher-end Midtown facilities behind.
Don't panic, there are still a few public restrooms.

If you are walking along Delancey Street
on the Lower East Side, this sturdy brick public lavatory
awaits you.
It's in the grassy median of Allen Street.

The U.S.
Department of the Interior
headquarters in
Washington,D.C.,
seems like a time capsule from around 1945.

This includes their restrooms,
featuring the old-style "Watch Your Step" urinals.

These vintage urinals have been updated with
infrared motion sensors controlling the flush valves.

The Department of the Interior toilets
are of similar vintage.

Their horseshoe seats are made of hard black rubber
with a dull finish.

Hard rubber is probably not as clean as a modern hard-surface
plastic, but then that wouldn't be as traditional.

Notice how the stalls have marble walls and dark wooden doors.
Classy!

You can visit these restrooms on your way to and from the
Department of the Interior museum.
Among other things, the museum explains that the department
administers mining and oil extraction industries providing
the raw materials for such common everyday items as
33-1/3 RPM long-playing records.
So, these designs seem very appropriate for the
department headquarters.

The
Corcoran Gallery of Art
is just a few blocks away from the Department of the
Interior in
Washington,D.C..
The Corcoran has some of the big old trumpet shaped urinals
from the 1930s or 1940s.

Moving on to the east, past the White House,
we eventually reach
Chinatown.

We can stop for lunch and a toilet break at the
Tai Shan restaurant.

You'll need a place to stay in
Washington,D.C.
The
Hilltop Hostel
has been a great place to stay.
Here is one of its toilets.

The Hilltop is at 300 Carroll Street,
close to the Takoma Metro station.

Here's a huge row of portable toilets near the
Tidal Basin
and
Jefferson Memorial
in
Washington,D.C.

Notice how the two on this end look unusually wide?

They're wheelchair accessible!

The Invisible Urinal
lurks at the
51st State Tavern
at
2512 L Street NW
in
Washington,D.C.
It's not too far from the Foggy Bottom / G.W.U. Metro
station, on the way to Georgetown.

Yes, this image is flagged as "used",
but only because of the visible one.

The 51st State also has
a pressure-flushing toilet.

No, I didn't take the lid off,
I found it this way.

Moving up to the Boston area,
we come to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This first mens room is at the west end of the
Infinite Hallway.
It's room 7-107 in the Rogers Building at MIT.

Harvard University
is just walking distance up Mass Ave from the MIT
campus in
Cambridge.
The second picture shows one men's room in Harvard's
Peabody Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology.

While National Park Service pit toilets are pretty standardized,
in the interest of completeness this one is at a campsite
on an island in the northern part of Crooked Lake,
around UTM 15 0589359 5339141
or
48.1992°N, 91.7974°W.

Click here
to see the toilet itself, the entrance to the men's room
and its location in the busy central concourse of the airport,
and to read about the incident.

The
Mehanata
Bulgarian bar
on the Lower East Side in
New York
has some interesting anthropomorphic
plumbing.

This nicely decorated men's room is on the 25th floor
of the
Galt House
hotel in
Louisville,Kentucky,
near their RIVUE restaurant and lounge.

Large windows provide sweeping views of Louisville,
the Ohio River, and across the river into Indiana.

Venice Beach,
in
Los Angeles,California,
has a long boardwalk lined with shops, cafes, musical acts,
artists, tattoo parlors, and medical marijuana clinics.
And, every so often, you come across a shiny set of public
stainless steel toilets.
Just be careful if you have a little too much
medical
marijuana.
You don't want to fall and hurt yourself while
in these toilets.
A
Los Angeles personal injury lawyer
could assist you if you do have a serious injury.
A lawyer can help you with your interactions with
your insurance
company
to ensure that you are treated fairly.

For some reason, the water pipes in
El Segundo,
California, are partially above ground.
Clean-out traps and valves are easily accessible,
which makes a lot of sense for maintenance and
expansion.
But I haven't seen supply lines done this way before...

The Aftermath

It's right on the coast, just south of
Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) and
between the city of El Segundo and the beach.

This is the only sewage treatment plant for all of Los Angeles.
The sewage is dried into a highly flammible powder
and used to run generators, so the sewage treatment plant
has a surplus of power and actually feeds electricity
back into the grid.

Keep up the good work, Los Angeleans!
Your city counts on your continued contributions!

Aircraft

This toilet is in a lavatory on board an
Airbus A330 en route from London to Detroit.

This is one of the lavatories against the fuselage skin,
not one of the only slightly more roomy
center ones.
So, the bulkhead behind the toilet curves out,
making this a little more awkward to use.

Why do your ears sometimes feel pressure changes
when you flush an airline toilet?
Because the vacuum flushing may cause the pressure
altitude within the tiny toilet cabin to quickly
jump 5 to 20 meters, say from about 2000m pressure
altitude to 2015m.

For other odd A330 photographs, see my
Gallery of Crash Dump Screens.
The seatback entertainment systems run an embedded
version of the Linux operating system.
The OS is fairly stable, but the application is not.

Trains

During the 1970's the U.S. federal government nationalized
most all passenger rail service in the United States,
forming
Amtrak.
The resulting trains are nice inside, and along the
East Coast they keep to useful schedules.

These, however, are from The Cardinal,
which links Chicago and New York via
Cincinnati and Washington,
loosely approximating a three-times-weekly schedule,
and Chicago and Indianapolis on the other four days.
At least the stainless toilets are fairly nice!

They're the classic holding tank design, which means
that the tank can fill and the lavatory be closed
en route on the 26-hour trip between
New York and Chicago.

This toilet is on board one of
Amtrak's high-speed Acela trains
running between Boston and Washington, D.C.

As you can see, it's very similar to the vacuum flushing
aircraft toilet design.

This stainless steel toilet suite is on board a
MARC (Maryland Rail Commuter Service) train
between Washington and Baltimore.

Buses

Yes, Greyhound buses have on-board toilets.
They have a holding tank with the traditional blue juice.
I was surprised to see that the design is just a straight
drop down a wide shaft into the tank.
I would think that the toilet could get awfully smelly
on a long hot trip.
There is a small air vent directly to the exterior
just to the right of your head if you were sitting
on the seat.

The toilet compartment occupies the right half of what
would be a full-width rear bench seat and what would be
the pair of seats just in front of that on the right side
of the aisle.

Note to self — do not sit in the back two rows of
a Greyhound bus, where the door to the toilet is directly
across the aisle.

Megabus,
one of Greyhound's competitors,
connects major cities with luxury buses that you can
board without venturing into the always dicey Greyhound
terminal.

Really, Greyhound's market seems partially based on brand
loyalty based on fond memories of rides home from prison.

Anyway, the buses are quite nice, and they include an
on-board lavatory.
But as you see here, they're very similar to the Greyhound ones.

There are only so many things you can do with the design
of a long-haul bus toilet.

Ships

The Staten Island Ferry provides free rides between the
lower tip of Manhattan and Staten Island, across New York
harbor and past the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.

If you need to go before you board, the first toilet shown
here is an all-stainless-steel model in the Manhattan terminal.

My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001,
although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous
Toilet of the World page until
January 17, 2002.
Some time soon after that I split it into categories,
and the collection has grown ever since.

In December, 2010 I registered the
toilet-guru.com
domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.